martes, 9 de marzo de 2010

El negocio de Google: confianza pública

Ken Auletta, que firma la sección Annals of Communications en The New Yorker, es el autor de Googled, The End of the World as We Know It, quizá el mejor análisis de la cosa hasta el momento.

La clave de todo se llama confianza del público. De Auletta no hay que perderse nunca nada. The Guardian ha publicado un extracto del libro que, bueno, sí: pone los dientes largos:
Page and Brin also rejected the idea that anyone should be allowed to pay to rank higher in the search results. They insisted that one way to build a team culture was for everyone to share an office. And they defied the conventional wisdom of the time, that portals like Yahoo! and AOL were thriving because they trapped visitors in their walled garden and could thus sell many more ads. What mattered, Page and Brin said, was building user trust. By making the average search take less than half a second and, unlike most portals, by not trying to trap users on Google content sites, they would win the public's trust. Build it right, they believed, and the people will come. […]

Then, late last year, Google announced it was tired of compromising with China and might pull out. This position – it was not a decision – was championed by Brin, and this time Google's management spoke with one voice, for they had learned that the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents were being hacked into, presumably with the support of the government. Allow such behaviour to go unpunished, and Google risked subverting the user trust that had been at the core of its success.
Confianza del público. Es lo que suscitaban los diarios antes de… antes de… antes de… Snifff! Buaaaaaaa!

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